Here’s the maddening thing about the revised design for the iconic tower at ground zero, unveiled Friday: It isn’t so bad that New Yorkers are likely to junk it, as they did the uninspired first round of plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center.
The design, which is largely the creation of architect David Childs and is known as the Freedom Tower, would produce a world’s tallest building that would strive for — without reaching — great aesthetic heights.
True, it calls for an innovative structural system that would give the tower its torquing, twisting shape. And it offers the dazzling prospect of energy-generating wind turbines that would spin nearly 1,500 feet above the sidewalks of lower Manhattan.
Yet as the banality of the twin towers made clear when they were completed in the early 1970s, there is a critical difference between technical achievement and aesthetic quality.
New York deserves better
This is not the skyline icon that New York and the nation deserve in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The parts don’t constitute a persuasive whole, at least not yet. A rush to an artificial deadline — apparently established so New York Gov. George Pataki can break ground during next summer’s Republican National Convention in Manhattan — has put us in this fix.
So has the stormy, ill-defined partnership between Childs, who heads the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and ground zero master planner Daniel Libeskind. The outcome shows clearly that the pen that shaped Freedom Tower was in Childs’ hand and that Libeskind was reduced to the role of commentator rather than being a true collaborator.
One of the great strokes of Libeskind’s master plan, which Pataki selected in February after a design competition that excited enormous public interest, was that it composed the signature tower from a series of clearly defined parts. The angular, asymmetrical design brought the lower Manhattan skyline to a pin-topped climax without overpowering it, as the original twin towers did.
It also evoked the upraised arm of the Statue of Liberty, ingeniously drawing the entire landscape — the statue, New York Harbor and the skyline — into a powerful symbolic whole.
But as many Americans are now discovering, a master plan is different from an architectural blueprint. A master plan only suggests the rough configuration of buildings and where they might be located. It does not dictate the way that buildings should look. Nor should it, unless we want to stifle an architect’s creative freedom.
Childs thus had wiggle room when Larry Silverstein, the developer who holds the lease to the trade center, designated him the architect for Freedom Tower. Childs wanted a more simple, singular form — not a shepherd with a crook, as he derisively referred to Libeskind’s design when I visited his office in late October.
Now, for the first time, the public can see what Childs has been up to — at precisely the moment (if Pataki’s hurry-up schedule is foolishly adhered to) when there is almost no time left for public debate.
Wind power
The $1.5 billion tower, scheduled to be completed in 2009, would rise from a parallelogram-shaped base formed by the surrounding streets, tapering and torquing to meet the prevailing winds and harness their energy.
Above its 70 stories of office space, which would rise to the height of 1,100 feet, would be a 400-foot-tall cable suspension structure that would be a contemporary version of the nearby Brooklyn Bridge. It would be filled with wind turbines that would take advantage of the stiff winds that blow off the nearby Hudson River.
Rising still higher would be a 276-foot spire that would bring the tower to its history-evoking — and record-shattering — height of 1,776 feet.
The glassy tower would have a diagonal structural grid that would wrap around its perimeter and would combine with its concrete core to give it substantial strength and plenty of column-free interior space.
If nothing else, the design represents a great leap forward from the unimaginative towers the public saw in the first round of ground zero plans in 2002. They were blocky blobs that shaped meaningless memorial voids.
Here, at least, is the rigorous structural logic that has long characterized the work of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the drive for innovation that is visible in the vertical wind farm, and the desire to speak to a broader urban context that can be seen in the presence of the spire. Along with the cable-enclosed open space, it could make the tower a glistening beacon, especially at night.
As urban design, the tower would at least preserve some key elements of Libeskind’s master plan, from the 1,776-foot height, to the off-center spire, to a diagonal-roofed form that culminates the upward spiral of a group of slice-topped office buildings. It even improves on Libeskind’s design, its twisting shape suggesting the forward stride of the Statue of Liberty.
But all that only brings things so far. Retaining parts of the Libeskind plan does not a great tower make, even though it provides political cover to the governor and to Silverstein, who can claim that they have seamlessly improved upon Libeskind’s original design.
Overbearing design
The truth is somewhat harder to swallow than that sugarcoated version: Childs’ revised design, despite its structural filigree, is too strong, too monolithic. It repeats the twin towers’ mistake of overbearing massiveness. It’s as if he had created a hipper version of one of the old World Trade Center high-rises. That may account for the bleating of armchair architecture critics who were sounding off Friday on the Web: If you’re going to build one giant tower, why not do two?
Restoring the gigantism of the twin towers would be the worst thing, of course. There are new ways to build supertall and they are being exploited with far more lyrical results by architects such as Kohn Pedersen Fox in its design for the Shanghai World Financial Center, a 95-story tower that will be culminated by a giant Zen-like circular void at the top of its tapering form.
There is an integration of parts in that design, a fully realized sculptural dynamism, that this one lacks, with its spire perched like a giant’s javelin on the tower’s top — clearly an aesthetic afterthought.
In addition, there are crucial unanswered questions: Can that wind turbine technology really work? How will the Freedom Tower meet the ground and relate to the ground zero memorial and the public spaces Libeskind so carefully mapped out?
It appears, for example, that the tower’s parallelogram shape would wipe out Libeskind’s plan for a triangle-shaped “Heroes Park” across the street from the memorial. Now, a Skidmore spokeswoman says, the park would be shifted to the west of the tower. There, its relationship to the memorial area would be drastically undercut.
The problem at Freedom Tower is the same problem with the unremarkable set of memorial designs for ground zero: the eternal conflict between getting things done and getting them done right.
Given the enormity of this skyscraper and the enormous statement it will make about America’s creative response to the worst terrorist attack in the nation’s history, one has to ask: What’s the rush?
The design has merits, and it certainly is a major improvement over the first round of ground zero plans, but that is faint praise. Childs, an architect of considerable talent and conscience, can do better. If America is to truly honor the victims of Sept. 11, the imperative to do so is not simply aesthetic, but moral.
